A critique of some tone universals proposed by Woo

From the introduction: In an unpublished doctoral dissertation written in 1969, Nancy Woo proposed a set of universal prosodic features. In brief, she states that a stress feature is needed (45), but not a length feature; all length is best treated as geminction (237). For tone, three features are needed: high, low, and modify (236). The feature \u27modify\u27 involves some component besides pitch, and is needed for languages with more than three pitch levels (251). All tone languages are register systems; contours are best treated as sequences of registers, each on a separate sonorant segment (141). She illustrated her thesis primarily with data from Mandarin and other Chinese dialects. Recently, Halle has shown that Woo\u27s system of features works will for describing Slavic accent (1971), and Leben has shown that the system also helps to describe Thai (1971). In this paper I attempt a critique of two of Woo\u27s proposals: the feature \u27modify\u27, and the segmental nature of tone. In support of my criticisms, I refer to published materials, mainly on Amerindian tone languages

Reduplication and anomalous rule ordering in Copala Trique

From the introduction: Reduplication is a process that often seems to be associated with exceptions to the application of phonological rules. Either reduplicated forms are exempt from the application of a rule, as described by Munro and Benson (1973) for Luiseño, or else they are subject to the application of rules in environments where they wouldn\u27t be expected to apply, as in certain Tagalog examples mentioned by Bloomfield (1933:222). In this paper I discuss a problem of the second type in Copala Trique

Tabulator Redux: writing Into the Semantic Web

A first category of Semantic Web browsers were designed to present a given dataset (an RDF graph) for perusal, in various forms. These include mSpace, Exhibit, and to a certain extent Haystack. A second category tackled mechanisms and display issues around linked data gathered on the fly. These include Tabulator, Oink, Disco, Open Link Software's Data Browser, and Object Browser. The challenge of once that data is gathered, how might it be edited, extended and annotated has so far been left largely unaddressed. This is not surprising: there are a number of steep challenges for determining how to support editing information in the open web of linked data. These include the representation of both the web of documents and the web of things, and the relationships between them; ensuring the user is aware of and has control over the social context such as licensing and privacy of data being entered, and, on a web in which anyone can say anything about anything, helping the user intuitively select the things which they actually wish to see in a given situation. There is also the view update problem: the difficulty of reflecting user edits back through functions used to map web data to a screen presentation. In the latest version of the Tabulator project, described in this paper we have focused on providing the write side of the readable/writable web. Our approach has been to allow modification and addition of information naturally within the browsing interface, and to relay changes to the server triple by triple for least possible brittleness (there is no explicit 'save' operation). Challenges which remain include the propagation of changes by collaborators back to the interface to create a shared editing system. To support writing across (semantic) Web resources, our work has contributed several technologies, including a HTTP/SPARQL/Update-based protocol between an editor (or other system) and incrementally editable resources stored in an open source, world-writable 'data wiki'. This begins enabling the writable Semantic Web

Tree and string analysis of a Copala Trique sentence

From the introduction: This paper is simply a presentation of two analyses of the same Copala Trique sentence. The first analysis is done by David Thomas and represents a string analysis, with a distinction between deep structure and surface structure. The second analysis is done by Bruce Hollenbach and represents a tree analysis done from the point of view of generative semantics. We hope that this presentation may be useful to those who might be interested in comparing and contrasting these two analytical techniques

Photoevaporation of protoplanetary discs I: hydrodynamic models

In this paper we consider the effect of the direct ionizing stellar radiation field on the evolution of protoplanetary discs subject to photoevaporative winds. We suggest that models which combine viscous evolution with photoevaporation of the disc (e.g. Clarke, Gendrin & Sotomayor 2001) incorrectly neglect the direct field after the inner disc has drained, at late times in the evolution. We construct models of the photoevaporative wind produced by the direct field, first using simple analytic arguments and later using detailed numerical hydrodynamics. We find that the wind produced by the direct field at late times is much larger than has previously been assumed, and we show that the mass-loss rate scales as $R_{in}^{1/2}$ (where $R_{in}$ is the radius of the instantaneous inner disc edge). We suggest that this result has important consequences for theories of disc evolution, and go on to consider the effects of this result on disc evolution in detail in a companion paper (Alexander, Clarke & Pringle 2006b).Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA